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FOXnews – Senate Could Mirror House Rebuke of Ports Deal

The Senate vote would come just one day after the House Appropriations Committee attached a similar amendment to a $91 billion emergency supplemental funding measure for hurricane recovery and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The committee vote in favor of the deal-blocker package was 62-2.

If they do this, I hope the UAE sends back every one of their Boeings and pulls out any investment they have in this country. It’s about time these idiots learned that politics has consequences.

Update:

Telegraph – Why Dubya’s right to back Dubai on P&O. By Jeff Randall

When Republican Congressman Peter King starts a political campaign against a commercial transaction, it’s pretty safe to assume that those who oppose him and support the deal are on the right side of the debate.

King, you will recall, was for many years Sinn Fein/IRA’s most brazen mouthpiece in Washington. Only after 9/11, when the reality of terror was brought into America’s living room, did he start to moderate his views on Irish nationalist outrages.

Now, with the IRA a busted flush in all but the most embittered Irish-American circles, King has switched the focus of his concern to a wholly different kind of threat, one that exists largely in his own mind.

Not that the news channels would ever think to point that out as they quote him. That would require research. Research requires understanding the concept of time.

For years, US companies bought and controlled foreign businesses. That was fine and dandy when America was winning; free trade was indisputably a good thing. But now that US economic hegemony is fraying at the edges, anxiety about the benefits of unfettered competition and open markets is emerging from sea to shining sea.

As Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin note in their wry look at American financial incontinence, Empire of Debt: “The main beneficiaries of the present gush of globalisation are the Asians. As American consumers turn to Wal-Mart to buy more and more things at ‘Every-Day Low Prices’, they find products from China and Malaysia on the shelves.”

With this in mind, American protectionists are on the march. And it is surely to their crude economic concerns, rather than any genuine worries about Al-Qaeda bombers, that King is appealing in his campaign against DP World. It’s the Big Whinge, sprinkled with hysteria, masquerading as principle.

Yeah!

Aside from issues of morality, Dubai simply cannot afford to sponsor terrorism. Which is why the White House has been unequivocal in its backing for DP World. For once, Bush got it right when he said: “It would send a terrible signal to our friends and allies not to let this transaction go through.”

Telegraph – Chauvinism in the US

The case against the Dubai company is that it is part of the Muslim world, the chief source of global terror. This crude piece of chauvinism fails to distinguish between a hostile Islamic state, such as Iran, and one that is a staunch ally of Washington in a strategically crucial region.

Through tourism, transport and business, Dubai is preparing for the day when its oil runs out. Such foresight should be welcomed, not penalised. To block DP World from inheriting P&O assets in the six ports would be highly damaging to America’s reputation in a region where it needs all the friends it can get. …

Rather than explaining the benefits of globalisation – whether Asian purchases of US Treasury bonds or the pre-eminence of Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil or General Motors – these short-sighted politicians are pandering to a protectionist impulse strengthened by bogus security concerns.